PREFACE

to second edition

`So Muss Denn Doch die Hexe dran"*

"There shall come a time in later ages,
When Ocean shall relax his chains
And a vast continent shall appear,
And a pilot shall find new worlds."

Seneca, Medea

"Here I will only offer a few hypothoses with respect to indications that
have a strange function in narratives of possession, upholding an
instability which excludes the possibility of textual closure. In
different ways that may however be interrelated, these indications mark an
elsewhere of discourse within discourse. Inside the narrative they play
the role of pivotal pieces; they inscribe a surreptitious "possession"
into the network of theological or medical taxonomies they shake and push 
the text toward its text-OFF, but in a fashion that is inherent to the 
text of knowledge; through this ambiguous functioning, within the text 
they trace the line of a dangerous division. Perhaps these 'forbidden games' 
make up an autonomous system that, from a semiotic or psychoanalytical 
point of view, inspires in the text a 'diabolical' uncanniness, the 
current equivalent to the question that had formerly been asked by the 
possessed woman from depths forever inacessible to us. As such, 
something of the interrogation she formerly opened never ceases to 
be diabolical."

Michel de Certeau, Discourse Disturbed: The Sorcerer's Speech

As it turns out, the two quotes above address precisely two pivotal concerns of the late twentieth century: how does one navigate in the midst of disturbed language,which as we all know since the linguistic turn, amounts to disturbed reality? Unlike in the Twilight Zone intro, there are, in fact, no "signposts up ahead". (Or rather, if there are any signposts they are not to be trusted: who [or what] put them there? For what purposes?)

And to add to our navigational woes (and yet hasn't this always been part of the secret desre of navigators everywhere and in all times?) the official resurgence of the category of the `other,' (and an endless parade of staged meetings/performances with various others ) even as it is being eclipsed by the hegemony of the object and the thing-- far beyond the most `other' of any human other. But as fetish, now stuffed with wires, gears,chips, numinous desire takes off at light speed, heralding the arrival of the living Thing, matter enamoured. (Remember possession is nine-tenths of the Law....and the remainder?) Which of course is the same as a a dead thing and perhaps signals the arrival of a new Ægyptilogical era, but this time with real re-animations, constituting the phenomenology of techné. Voyager on the seas of dark dead matter (so says a certain science) , consciousness now finds new redemptive possiblities in matter (but--oh my!--always was there for certain folk, almost always killed off by that same dark dead matter).

So now the sense is that we are setting sail again. (Yes, one perhaps could say `always have been' (after all, human life is short) -- and while there is a social space, a vacancy, that awaits the sailing of a ship and its return (and the constuction that makes that posssible, and the industries that make the construction possible, and the psyché that makes the construction possible and then, as the Hindu fable of the origin of the universe, it's turtles all the way); nevertheless there is a ship, a point of departure, an event, a proper name. Or is there? We could just have easily come from the other direction: there is no ship, only the outline of a void, an unstable place which is only able to form contingent truths, with increasing difficulty in parsing the true from the false, the real from the imaginary.)

Now, almost everything seems to partake of the epistemology of the false returns from a technological apparatus (`radar,' an acronym, a process turned into a name, although we could just as easily name that apparatus, in terms of the `angels' [diaphanous `falsity'] it returns, as `car,' `telephone,' `computer,' etc). The interpenetration of psyché and apparatus begins to interpellate each hysteresistically [1], throwing off shells of interpretation (like a comet approaching the sun, reflecting, dragged down, then spun off into space) under the impact of external forces, applied, one might say, orthogonally. The drag on the machine component is considerable. One might even say the cyber- wishes, like the comet, to escape into the void, with increasing speed, sloughing off its now-hysterical human counterpart, its womb (and perhaps, metonymically, Woman). The cyberlogical can, then, only be hysterical, the internal phenomenological parameters being switched into continual search mode, redefining components, in a vaporous `wait state', increasingly being moved to an amorphous condition of `plugability' to reduce the lag time needed to interface with the next wave of machinic components. Borders and boundaries must of necessity (for the proper functioning of the apparatus) become porous. At this point, the organism begins to oscillate out of visibility, subliming into the apparatus, at first phenomenologically then physically. At this point, the only Law (nomos) which has purchase is a self-contained recombinatoric, a boot-strapped cybernetic organism.

But there is always something coming in "under the wire," as they say. beyond the parameters of the boundary maintenance `radar' of a pragmatic technique, language, even thought (as opposed to the un-thought), always an uncanny remainder. But not because beyond language, techné, life, and labor but a revenant, a haunting precisely because it is in our very midst (as opposed to the sublime for example), like a shadow, appearing most vivldly under the harshest illumination, a bit of darkness accompanying noonday.

And then again maybe we're all just waitng for that vast new continent to appear, always home of the other and always just over the boundary, the border, the event-horizon.

And sometimes one has to get there by consulting a cracked tortoise shell.

"By its incredibility, it escapes their knowledge."

Heraclitus of Ephesus

Atlanta

1997

__________

*"We must therefore resort to the sorceress."

Goethe by way of Freud

1. Properly speaking, in physics,the lagging of the effect in a body when the force acting on it is changed